A Semi-Daily Advocate of the Modern School, Industrial Unionism, and
Individual Liberty.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Blogging Overload

I've got too many things in the queue that require substantive (or not so much) posts, including:

I have to actually write down clearly the legal argument against RIDE's current interpretation of mayoral academy admissions.

I need to write a post clearly explaining what's going on with the Meeting Street mayoral academy application. A charter school inside a private school that mixes the schools' costs and populations is as far as I know unprecedented. These things don't come up coincidentally in the contemporary school reform world.

Yet another "WTF NECAP 11th grade math" post. They didn't move at all again; everyone seems afraid to say the obvious -- we don't know if there is a drop off in math performance at the high school level because the test is so much harder than both the middle school and other high school tests. This creates a serious chilling effect on high school reform in RI. Blackstone Academy jumped up to around 30% last year but they stayed stuck there this year. Any turnaround or other plan that requires a school to get low income kids at over a 30% proficiency rate is set up for failure.

I need to write a critique of RI-CAN's proposal for "success schools," which would apparently give schools the "autonomy" to implement a narrow set of prescriptive changes, all of which they can do already aside from not having sufficient funding -- which this wouldn't help with.

In the end I can't really believe the past three years actually happened. I mean, when the Brady administration arrived with the high school strategy of "first, phase out all successful programs that serve low-income high school students," it was obvious we'd end up here. But yes, it really happened.

At my wife's new school, they're coming to the sudden realization that three years after the school was opened with a staff almost entirely selected by "criterion based hiring," run from the beginning according to the current reform agenda, the only question is "Are we all losing our positions next year, the year after, or the year after that?" It would be best if it happened during this contract...